Sunday, January 17, 2016

In this intriguing CTV News video, "Forbidden Montreal: Inside the Mount Royal Tunnel", we see the railway tunnel through Montreal's mountain. The tunnel also appears in my poem, "Mountain", in Shimmer Report. Wikipedia tells us itl was built in the early years of the last century to give the CNR access to downtown Montreal. By any reckoning it was a major project, and is still the second longest railway tunnel in Canada. Funny, I wrote the poem without knowing of its existence. After penning the poem, I went online to see if we had indeed, as I say in the 4th line, "tunnelled through" our mountain, and discovered we had! Poetry, too, can be a form of fact-finding.MOUNTAIN

Thursday, October 15, 2015

About forty guests came to this launch at The Word, a storied, steadfast brick-and-mortar bookstore in the McGill Ghetto. Among those pictured above: Adrian King, owner of The Word, et moi (picture 2 from the top); Cora Siré et moi (7); Maxianne Berger & Jean-Pierre Pelletier (8); Jan Jorgenson & her husband Ted (9); myself & my wife, Jocelyne Dubois (10); Elise Moser, Cora Siré, & Hugh Hazelton (11). Many books were signed and sold. Thanks Adrian and Donna for hosting the event and arranging the food & drinks, to all of you who attended! It was a great evening!

Shimmer Report tells of a couple who do not fall in love so
much as ascend together into love from their own dark places. He, a
poet, musician, teacher; she, a visual artist and author, has also had
to endure the psychiatric system. Life and love are but a shimmer—but
this is a report on hard realities, as well as on flashes of colour,
delight, and whimsy.

Years of suffering
like gas into flame
have drawn air
into your light—
a leaping, lambent figure
in mist, burning bright

“Shimmer Report is a book of searing honesty and shy
grace. To read its poems becomes an act of witness as Brian Campbell
explores his city and his heart, evoking the requirements of love as
well as the vexed nuances of survival. I admire his courage.”
~ Mark Abley, author of The Tongues of Earth

“In Brian Campbell’s Shimmer Report, the poet asks,
“What dilemma is this now?” Using urban, multi-language Montreal for a
backdrop, and a palette of telling details in shades of wit and
compassion, Campbell explores today’s creativity and relationships
through echoes and upshots of complicated pasts. These are poems of love
and survival—in spite of, and because of, the curiosities of the world
we live in.”
~ Maxianne Berger, author of un renard roux/a red fox

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947) was a disturbing enigma. A career bureaucrat, he was the overseer of
Canada’s destructive Aboriginal schools policy—but also one of our country’s
important poets. It was natural for Mark Abley, a fine poet
himself as well as socially concerned journalist, to imagine bringing Scott
back to life in order to have a conversation.
The ghost story—or more precisely, a series of interviews with a ghost
visitor—is a superb narrative strategy, injecting humour, irony, and drama into
what could have been a pretty dry slog had Abley simply followed a more conventional research paper format. Abley portrays Scott as a product
of his time, and yet open to persuasion; he contrasts mores, manners, mentality
and even linguistic usage in a way that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.
An absorbing and delightful read! Highly recommended…

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

My wife and I loved her and her poetry. Her chapbook, Still Light at Five O'Clock Raphael Bendahan and I published when she was 85 -- and I treasure my one remaining copy. She was a kind woman, serene in her whimsical intelligence and wisdom. All my condolences to her family and other friends.

Somehow, I deleted this post. A strange way to undo what can't be undone. I'll try again, with that same heavy heart:

BRUCK, NINAMAE (nee FINKELSTEIN),
Died peacefully at home in Montreal on February 1, 2015, at 92.

Nina was a poet, photographer, and open-hearted observer of the beauty, injustice, and oddness of life. We were lucky to have her love and her whimsical humour for so long.

Predeceased in 2013 by her husband, Gerald Bruck, she is survived by her sons, Jerry Jr. and David, her daughter Julie (Lewis Buzbee), and her adored grandchildren, Zoe and Jacob Bruck and Madeleine Buzbee, by her nieces and friends, and by her loyal caregivers during her last years, especially our dear Hermie Granados.

At her request, there will be no funeral service. A memorial gathering of her family and friends will be planned in the coming months.
Donations in her memory can be made to Chez Doris (http://www.chezdoris.ca), or to the charity of your choice.

Monday, November 10, 2014

On Saturday night I launched my new Sky of Ink chapbook, A Private Collection, a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by works of art in my home. Appropriately enough, it was a private launch in my home. About 25 people were present, including a number of artists (some of whom are featured in the chapbook) and writer friends. We all had a wonderful time.http://youtu.be/wYVXCqLk5Ho

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

I remember my first e-book anthology -- actually a book of essays including a lot of poems, Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem. Line breaks were so badly mangled and the text so riddled with errors I eventually ordered a hard copy. Kay Ryan's Selected, which I downloaded the hour I read she had won the Pulitzer Prize, fared better because her short, skinny poems could be easily formatted in unalterable PDF images. I don't generally order poetry in e-book format -- I like to thumb through poetry books and dip into them -- but this is interesting news.

This is a favourite poem of mine from “The Psychiatrist”,
Mariela Griffor’s latest collection, sent to me for review by Eyewear
Publishing last year.Searingly poignant,
simply put, the poem expresses — in a way I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere —
how one can feel confronted and even intimidated by the innocent life force of a
young child.With this poem, I have only
one — albeit small — quibble: it’s with the antecedent of the pronoun “him” in
the line “has never overcome the loss of him”.We can assume it’s not the child itself, but a man, an adult love to
which she is referring — Ignacio, perhaps, mentioned in an earlier poem, or the
unnamed subversive in “Love for a Subversive”, the unnamed lover in “Rain”?
There is probably some way around this,
but at the same time, that pronoun in this poem has its own brute force.

Mariela Griffor was born and raised in Chile, and came into
adolescence and early adulthood under the Pinochet regime.As a young woman, she joined a revolutionary
group, and doubtlessly ended up on a blacklist.In 1985, she left Chile for Sweden under involuntary exile.Much later, in 1998, she moved with her
American husband and two daughters to the United States, where she is now
Honorary Consul for Chile in Michigan.

Here are poems of subversion, exile, and solidarity that
ache to be told: elegies for friends who were tortured or disappeared,
evocations of nights of insomnia, furtive meetings under code names, a character
sketch of a relative who was a possible undercover agent for DINA (National
Department of Intelligence.)

All contemporary Chilean poets – indeed, Latin American
poets – write under the shadow of Pablo Neruda.Indeed, Ms. Griffor will soon be coming out with a new translation of
his Canto General, published by
Tupelo Press. Her own style, though, doesn’t bear a trace of his lush,
surrealistic influence.She reminds me of
certain Eastern European poets — Czeslaw Milosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa
Szymborska among others — or of her own
countryman, Nicanor Para: poets that speak unvarnished truths with simple irony
and measured declaration. In some later poems in the collection, the Griffor’s
free verse becomes rather too prosaic for my taste:

My grandfather did not talk about what Mr. Monzalves said,

but it was clear that he knew that my grandfather

was a sympathizer of Allende and that he had come to deliver
a warning.

Just before I left Chile the last person I met from the
Front

in Santiago was my commander

His real code name was Wolf.

I told him I was planning to leave the country because I
could not avoid the surveilland anymore and my good friend,

the lawyer Inunza, had arranged for me to go to Sweden or
France.

(Exiles)

In a patch like this one, I wish that the authorhad fashioned an
introduction or searched more deeply for lyricism in her subject matter. In most places, though, her straightforward style has its own strength and sensibility.

The title of the collection raises expectations that it will
concern mental illness, or perhaps relate a series of psychiatric consultations.
The
brief title poem, however, is the only one where a psychiatrist is featured;
there he figures as a voice of authority in the narrator’s head that the poet
summarily shoots down to get on with her life.

Mariela Griffor’s “The Psychiatrist” is well worth buying
and reading.I look forward to seeing
more of her work.

About Me

Brian Campbell is a poet, singer-songwriter, editor, translator, and teacher. His third full-length collection, Shimmer Report, was published by Ekstasis Editions in 2015. He is also the author of A Private Collection (Sky of Ink Press chapbook, 2014),Passenger Flight (Signature Editions, 2009), Guatemala and Other Poems (1994) and Undressing the Night (Editorial Lunes, Costa Rica, 2007), a translation of the selected poems of Francisco Santos. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous reviews, including Saranac Review, New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and The Rover. A finalist in the 2006 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, he is also co-founder/editor of Sky of Ink Press, which prints quality poetry chapbooks. His independent music CD, The Courtier’s Manuscript, was released in 2002.